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Friday, September 11, 2015

On My Needles: Monogamous Knitter No More

I have been a mostly monogamous knitter for years. The sight of unfinished projects laying about my house, taunting me, was too awful to contemplate. My motto has been start and finish, start and finish.Until now. And I should have seen it coming.

I've been humming along on my Building in Color Afghan. I attend a monthly class at my LYS to learn a color knitting technique and have one month to create a color panel. Each one is 36 inches long, but I roll them up for storage. It's been fun, very doable and I'm halfway done! But with six months to go before there's actually a finished product, I need a little something else to keep me motivated.

Socks. Of course! I love sock knitting and it's long been a goal to knit my way through The Knitters Book of Socks. So I made a deal with myself: knit nine inches a week on the color panel, and if I finish early I can spend the rest of the week sock knitting. Deal! I've already finished one Stepping Stones Sock. This is almost too easy.

So I decided it wouldn't hurt to cast on a simple top-down raglan sweater for our granddaughter. It's only an 18-month size. Easy stockinette knitting in the round. It shouldn't be hard to squeeze in, and it would be nice to switch to a larger needle size after a bit of sock knitting. Besides, I have such soft, pretty alpaca-blend yarn in my stash just crying out to be used. See, I finished the body of the sweater before I knew it.You see where this is headed, don't you?

When I bought the yarn for the Scoreboard Cowl KAL (knit along), I knew once football season started I would be knitting this project on college football Saturdays. I could not resist the clever premise: choose the two colors of my favorite team, then designate one as a main color for my team and the secondary color to represent the opponent. When my team scores, I knit a round in the main color for every point. If the opposing team scores, switch colors and follow the same format. When the season is over, I will have an amazing, wearable knitted record of my team's season! I even talked my sisters into doing this one. That's enabling at its best.So Labor Day evening, I settled in to watch my beloved Ohio State Buckeyes take care of business at Virginia Tech. By the end of the game, I had a total of 66 rounds to knit, and I had not even completed the first half. Later I read that the average college game has a total of 60 points scored. The Buckeyes are favored for the rest of the season by double digits.This could be a problem.So to recap, every week I need to knit nine inches of my color panel, then I can switch to sock or sweater knitting. Every Saturday...and Sunday...I will watch football and work on the cowl. Sure, it's a plan, but is it sane? On the positive side, all these lovely projects need a home to rest in until it's their turn to be knit. And a few more row counters and needles wouldn't hurt, either. So I've been doing a little shopping. You can never have too many knitting supplies.

3 comments:

Great post Sue! I think you definitely have a plan in place . . . even if you did have to give up monogamy! That sweater looks so soft - your granddaughter is going to love it! And I totally laughed outloud at the "rules" for football knitting - have FUN!

My daughter would definitely agree with you - otherwise why would you have so many different sorts of needles? Hope you enjoy all the projects - and just think Christmas projects will be coming along soon too.

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